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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Random thoughts on Tradeskills

Lately all these random ideas have been floating around in my head, so I figured I would write them down. That way I'll get them out, and they might stop bugging me. I'll start with a couple of skills today, and prolly finish the list at some later time.

Enchanting
Boss loot drops are the enchanters' mining nodes. They're the flowers for herbalists and the skins for skinners, and yet somehow people often seem to feel that they have a right to the enchanting materials that come out of disenchanting a loot drop, but nobody ever roles for ore, flowers, or leather.

When I levelled my enchanting in Wrath many guildies sent me materials to level my skill. Still today people send me mats, and in change I enchant their gear. But if you're not that lucky with your guild, and you rely mainly on pugging to get your enchanting supplies, it's hard to get enough to level.

On top of that you're not making any money on boe greens since they're all becoming mats for skillpoints, whereas people without enchanting skill either sell them in AH or get them DEed for their own profit.

The way this is supposedly solved is by having tailoring as your second trade skill, and creating your own materials to disenchant for enchanting supplies. But, why do I have to spend all my cloth to enchanting materials, where people who don't have this profession can go and sell it on the AH or make grand profits out of making bags?

Surely the world would be a whole lot less fun without enchanters, but these mechanics aren't making enchanting more popular. Especially if you consider the enormous profits you can make with other professions while leveling them, while enchanting only costs money.

Also, the only reason I can think of that people feel they have a right to roll on enchanting materials from loot drops is that the enchanter couldn't possibly have gotten it without the rest of the group, so they feel entitled to the enchanting materials, because they 'helped' acquiring them.

Ideas for enchanting:

Have enchanting materials drop from bosses, next to normal loot, only visible by enchanters, and can only be picked up by enchanters. No enchanter in the group? No mats.

Make it possible to disenchant through the trade window.

Make it possible to disenchant multiple items at once, you could perhaps use ctrl click to be able to select multiple items.

Give enchanters something to craft again. Something to create that can be used for themselves, or for sales. BoE wands has always seemed like a good idea, and they were there in beta, I never did understand why they took it out.

If I can enchant items, why would I not be able to enchant mounts? or pets? let me give them a speed boost or a shiny glow.

Alchemy
My other profession is alchemy, and while it's a handy profession I can't say it's a very profitable one. I switched to it in BC because of the trinkets, but in Wrath all of a sudden they only gave us a very, very weak trinket, barely usable at 80 even.

On top of that I see new recipes come in for just about everything (yes, even enchanting had one in Ulduar), but alchemy has gotten nothing. Oh yah, silly resistance recipes on mobs in Icecrown.

Ideas for alchemy:

Can I please craft potions that can have nasty side effects on people? Like take a flask of rage and turn into a nasty looking animal? Purely visual of course, but that would definitely give me the giggles.

With those bunsen burners I swear I could cook up some stuff as well, what if I discovered that I could make my food more powerful by dropping a stack of it in a mana potion that was bubbling? Wouldn't it be drenched in mana and suddenly give me more mana while drinking and eating?

I want poof bombs. Yaknow, the type that you throw at someone and all of a sudden there's a cloud of smoke and POOF I've blinked elsewhere.

Potion of life: A very powerful draught which will revive your enemies. Ever had that you wished you could rez that rare spawn you just saw getting killed? Or that quest mob you waited forever for? Can only be used once per enemy since it will then disintegrate into ashes. (hunters will love you forever Blizz!).

And really, I want my trinkets back, useful ones please.

Jewelcrafting
JCers were a bit OP for a while (yes, you were), but that has been fixed. Even Jewelcrafting is rather lackluster though. You mine ore, you prospect ore, you find gem, you cut gem. Some trinkets, but surely there's more to do with this skill?

Ideas for jewelcrafing:

At low level JCers have stone statues they throw out and that work like tiny totems. Bring them back, they could be like the LW drums. It would be even better if they made voodoo sounds when you threw them out.

Pacifiy drakes a bit by throwing gems at them. The drake all of a sudden could hit for slightly less hard for the next two hits or so.

11 comments:

One of the reasons people want to roll on the enchanting materials at the end of dungeon is because of the counter arguement.... If there was no enchanter they could sell the items for gold. In a pug group the enchanter is basically asking everyone else to pay for their tradeskill, if they aren't willing to 'share the wealth'.

(of course in guild groups I never would take shards etc from the enchanter)

It's not just that skinners get a bonus. With loot drops from mobs, if there is no enchanter in the party, individual members can still roll on the loot and take it to an enchanter to be disenchanted. However, if there's no skinner in the party, there is no Arctic Fur to be rolled on; without an herbalist, the herbs in the instance are completely unusable; etc.

In other words, equating loot drops in instances to herb/ore nodes or skinnable mobs would require that if there were no enchanter present, the boss wouldn't drop loot. Since that's clearly not the case, a different comparison needs to be drawn. Frankly, in my experience as an enchanter (on an alt, I admit), my equivalent to herb/ore nodes was the Auction House, spending gold on mats instead of time flying around looking for nodes.

Honestly, the only reasonable solution I've seen for the enchanting problem - which has been going on for five years and shows no sign of being fixed - is to have enchanting materials be semi-rare drops from mobs (like cloth from humanoids or Chilled Meat from beasts, but less common), visible only to enchanters. Perhaps the very highest-end materials, Abyss Crystals etc., could only be acquired by disenchanting, to keep the high-end enchants reasonably uncommon.

For what it's worth, I don't think I've rolled on a shard since I hit 80. (My main is an herbalist/alchemist - and since the other herbalists in my guild seem to believe that if you see an herb, it's yours to take, even if there are other herbalists in the group, I don't often get herbs out of instances either.)

I totally agree with you about the Enchanter stuff, but given the current game mechanics in dungeons we just greed everything, and I de for the people I know in the group.

How do you handle engineering XT-002 for parts? At first our engineers thought mats to the guild bank was unfair. When I brought up the similarity to dis-enchanting unwanted epics for the guildbank, they changed their minds.

Well, we have a bit of a funny situation there. I think all the guild's engineering people are in our 10man, like all 4 of them or so. So normally they race it, for funs, and then divide stuff to whomever needs it most at that moment.

Within guild none of this stuff is a problem, problems only start when you invite the great unknown called PUG.

I didn't buy any of the enchants, I or my alts didn't need. Tough if I don't have what someone is after, my tradeskill is self supported, I funded it, most of the people who want enchants don't offer tips, or get upset if you expect a fee. "But you might get a skill up" they argue. I think if mats dropped off bosses though, they would still need to be tradeable. Enchanters could make a pretty penny from that :)